Author Archive

I’ve been using an iMac as my primary home computer for the last five years. Nice system, both as a desktop and as a server for the rest of the apartment, with a string of FireWire drives hanging off the back. It came with 4GB RAM, and in 2012 I added an extra 8GB so that I could run VirtualBox VMs. However in recent months it’s started to misbehave; about 10% of the time the display won’t come back from screen saver or sleep, and I have to restart via Cmd-Ctrl-Power. So I decided to replace it with a new iMac. Nothing too extravagant: a 21.5″ Retina iMac with Core i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB Fusion disk. (I looked at the 27″ model with a discrete GPU, but I couldn’t justify the expense. I’m not really a graphics junky. More practically, the 27″ wouldn’t fit under my over-desk cupboards.) I also ordered a FireWire-to-Thunderbolt adapter, hoping that my existing storage setup would just work.

The new iMac arrived yesterday, and I had a decision: clean install, or transfer from the old system? With the previous iMac, I’d done a transfer from my Mac Mini, so I knew that there was quite a bit of cruft in there. On the other hand, my Mail, iTunes and backup (Time Machine and Backblaze) configurations are complicated, and I was inclined to let the Migration tool take care of them. So I booted up the new system, hooked them together with an Ethernet cable, and let it rip. Six hours later, it was done. I plugged in my FireWire chain, using the new adapter, and everything just worked.

Sort of.

I spent a couple of hours testing and tweaking stuff, amused to see which apps required re-authentication and which ones treated this as a reincarnation of an already-trusted system. And then I remembered that I’d forgotten one cardinal rule: I hadn’t checked for software updates. So I did… and the OS X 10.11.1 update wouldn’t work. It just hung. Perhaps it was a “first boot” issue; I’ve often noticed that things in OS X don’t work quite right after an update, and a reboot usually fixes them. So I chose restart.

Black screen. “Bong” sound. White Apple logo. Then "kernel panic" in the top left corner.

Tried again. Same result.

I contemplated the time required to do a full reinstall of OS X. I wondered about Genius Bar appointments. And then I decided to reboot in Safe Mode (holding down shift right after the “Bong”). That worked, though the system was glacially slow.

So I grabbed my rMBP (what would I have done with only one computer?) and started searching for kernel extensions that might be causing the problem. Eventually I found this piece about VirtualBox-related panics. I opened a terminal, deleted the offending files, and rebooted. The panic was gone – and, equally important, the 10.11.1 update installed correctly. Later today I’ll try a clean installation of VirtualBox to see if it’s OK. (I use a VirtualBox VM to cache all of my context for open source work, including keys and git scripts.)

The obvious quote is “Please, sir, I want some more.” However perhaps more apposite is another from the same book: “Some people are nobody’s enemies but their own.” A year ago, we moved from Santa Clara to our new apartment in downtown San Jose. We’d been using an old DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem together with an Apple Airport Extreme for Internet service, and for various reasons it hadn’t been very satisfactory. When we arrived in San Jose, I decided to replace them with an all-in-one solution: a DOCSIS 3.0 modem with built-in Wi-Fi router from Netgear.

For the last 12 months we’ve put up with the consequences of this misguided attempt at simplification:

My company VPN keeps dropping the connection, requiring a tedious security scan while it re-establishes the session.

Video and audio through WebEx (our standard collaboration tool) is so unpredictable that I usually arrange for a call-back to my cellphone.

While watching a movie on Netflix we can expect at least a dozen shifts between different video quality levels as the streaming codecs try to compensate for bandwidth and jitter.

Elder Scrolls Online is… challenging.

Speed tests routinely showed less than 15Mb down, which is a lot less than we’re paying for. (I’d love a good long-term jitter measurement tool…)

A couple of days ago I (again!) started poking around the net looking for solutions. This time, I discovered that a number of other Netgear users had experienced similar problems, particularly with VPN access. Moreover the consensus was now pretty overwhelming: all-in-one solutions are just too inflexible. So today I replaced the C3700 with a $99 Arris SB6141 – a simple, no-frills DOCSIS 3.0 modem; no Wi-Fi, no GbE switch. (OK, it does have efficient channel bonding (8 downstream, 4 upstream), but hopefully that will be completely transparent.) After calling Comcast to provision the new modem, I dusted off the old Airport Extreme and plugged it in. And then I ran a speed test.

66Mb down, 12Mb up.

Not South Korean speeds, or Google Fiber, but a lot better than I’d been used to. And this setup should be able to handle the 150Mb upgrade that Comcast is trying to tempt me with. In the meantime, it’s going to take a few days of testing – particularly streaming video during peak hours – to see if this kind of performance is sustainable. Fingers crossed…

This post was prompted by two things today. First, Tom Gill remarked on how important it was to pick the right kind of aircraft for the season (e.g. avoiding range-limited types when there are lots of delays, headwinds, etc.) and tagged me in his post. And second, I realized that my second flight today (IAH-SFO) was on a type of aircraft that I’d never flown before. And got got me thinking: what have I actually flown on?

My first flights, back in 1961, were on Aer Lingus Vickers Viscounts. Today these would be categorized as regional turboprops, along with Saab 340s and so forth. I’m not interested in those. But apart from those, what does the list look like?

I’ve been using credit (and debit) cards for around 40 years. In that time, the card has barely changed: 85.60 × 53.98 mm laminated plastic, rounded corners, with the number embossed across the middle, my name and the expiration date embossed below it, and a signature panel on the back. A few decorations have appeared – a chip on the front, a hologram, a security code on the back, even my own photo. But the basic card has remained the same. And many other cards that I own follow the same form factor, for obvious reasons.

I just got a new card (a Chase Mileage Plus Explorer), and it’s different. Radically different. It’s half the thickness, for a start. On the front my name is printed (not embossed) in slightly raised letters. On the back, my name, the card number, and the expiration date are printed below the signature stripe, using the same slightly raised style. There’s a hologram, but no chip. (Boo!)

I’m sure this is going to be more convenient in everyday use. The merchant can read the card number, my name, and the signature without turning the card over. It’s thinner: if all my cards were this thick, I could use a much slimmer wallet. (As it is, I’m worried about this one falling out of the slow.) On the other hand, I can’t see how this would work with an old-style carbon-copy credit card machine. If not, will some merchants refuse it? (I’m not the first to worry about this, see here and here, including the comments.) Does this card conform to the ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 standard? It certainly looks thinner than 0.76 mm.

Yesterday I bought myself a Google Nexus 5 phone to replace my iPhone 5C. Although I’m a rock solid Mac user – I couldn’t imagine trying to live with either Windows or Linux on my desktop – I find myself drifting away from the iOS world. In the last year, for example, I’ve used my Kindle Fire tablet far more often than my iPad. But the main thing provoking the switch is that I really want to increase my use of my Google Glass. Restrictions in iOS (especially the inability of user apps to route IP traffic between BlueTooth, WiFi and LTE), coupled with the flakiness of the iOS Mobile Hotspot feature, mean that Glass simply works better with an Android phone. (And before you say, “but of course”, the changes that have affected interoperability have all come from Apple.)

Now I’ve tried this Android switch once before, and it was not a pleasant experience.In August 2011, I acquired an AT&T Samsung Infuse. It was big, fast and gorgeous, as I wrote here. But my infatuation soon wore off. The problems were many: overheating, bloatware, lockups, buggy software, the failure of AT&T and Samsung to keep the software up to date, and a handful of incredibly annoying “features” with no workaround. (Posting a notification when the phone was fully charged – often in the middle of the night – was the most asinine.)

So that experiment lasted less than 6 months, and then I returned to the walled garden. So this time I’m trying to be smarter about it. By choosing Google’s own Nexus, I can be (pretty) sure that I’ll always have up-to-date software. And I know where they live….

2013 was an eventful year in many respects. There were professional moves – first to Vyatta, and then to Cisco – and a number of changes affecting family and friends. I remained interested in the topics that I’ve written about over the years – technology, politics, philosophy, atheism, books, music, and so forth – but none of this touched geoffarnold.com.

The main reason, I think, is that my work-related stuff all wound up on my tech blog, speakingofclouds, which had a modestly successful year. Reviews of books and other media were posted to Amazon.com. And I shared most of my ephemeral content – news and opinion – over at Facebook.

With all that said, I’m not going to close this blog, even though pundits are once again declaring that “the blog is dead”. I want a place where I can do a little long-form writing on non-technical topics, and this is the best I can think of.

I wound up getting an Apple MacBook Pro Retina 13-inch, 2.6GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Half a dozen of my colleagues had chosen the 13″ rMBP with various sizes of SSD, and it feels like the perfect compromise between power and weight. Normally I’d have bought an extra power supply, but since I have several perfectly serviceable spares, I saved a little money by picking up a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converter.

My first tasks when I got home were to upgrade to OS X 10.8.3 (it shipped with 10.8.2) and install Microsoft Office. In the past, this was an expensive and niggling procedure, picking just the right version to get the features I wanted. But Office 365 has made all that a thing of the past. $99 a year lets me install pretty much everything I need on up to five of my machines – Windows or Mac. I added Microsoft Lync and a Citrix Web Client, turned on FileVault, and I’m good to go.

I few weeks ago I started work at Vyatta, which had been recently acquired by Brocade. On my first day, I was handed a Brocade corporate laptop. It’s a Dell: 13″ screen, 4GB, 128GB SSD, Windows 7. As corporate laptops go, it’s perfectly nice, but I’ve been a Mac user for many years now, and Windows Just. Feels. Wrong. The first time I tried to send a reply to a meeting invitation in Outlook and found that I couldn’t navigate back to look at another email message, I realized that (a) Outlook still had many of the bugs we first encountered 15 years ago, and (b) I was damned if I was going to use that crap to run my work.

As I wandered around Vyatta and Brocade, I noticed many MacBooks in use. Apparently many others felt the same way that I did. As an experiment, I configured my personal MacBook Air as a work machine – (guest) wireless network, Exchange, Lync for IM, Office, etc. – and apart from a few corporate functions it all seemed to work just fine. However, as a matter of policy I don’t want to mix work and personal stuff – certificates, passwords, email, browser settings – on one machine. So I’m planning to go out and get myself a MacBook for dedicated work use, and I would like some help in making the choice. (And yes, I’ll keep the Dell laptop, chained to my desk, for those occasions when I need to log in to Oracle or other corporate systems.)

Weight is important. Today I love my 11-inch MacBook Air: it’s as light as a feather. On the other hand, putting together a complicated PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is challenging on such a small screen. And power is also important: I want enough RAM and CPU to run DevStack or CloudStack under VirtualBox. And of course I don’t want to spend too much…